My sister and Mum visited China for the first time in Easter. They arrived in Beijing and then flew to see me in Guangzhou. After that, we joined the plush, luxury cruise ship, Yangtze Number One sailing downstream from Chongqing to Yichang. Aboard the president’s boat were, an American couple - the Managing Director of some manufacturing firm in Beijing, a touring railway driver and his wife from Australia, a British couple from Coventry, and another couple from Australia. We shared dinner with the Captain, the Chinese and a group of Dermatologists. The food was pretty good and the conversations revolved on travel to far flung destinations!
The boat trip sails for 4 days and 3 nights arriving at the 3 gorges dam in the evening. The city of Chongqing has a museum, which presents the geology of the river area in some detail. The section with the stuffed animals is a little macabre and it really doesn’t do much to repair the sentiment of loss at the flooded ecosystem. The part I found interesting was the picture with the changes in cost of living. What the farming Chinese get for their yuan showed me that previously a farmer could buy an ox with his yuan, now it is corn and cereal for the same price.
Outisde the museum, some local school girls said they liked my fashion style and asked for my photograph! I was astonished, but agreed as they seemed very friendly and sincere.
Anchors away, I sat outside on the balcony and sheltered from the wind and the rain. My sister slept the whole way and my mum wrote postcards that would arrive weeks after she returned home. Oh well, it's planting seeds of travel plans in some relatives' heads no doubt.
The highlight of the journey was the excursion to the Little Gorges Dam, which we made by a bamboo boat. The journey to the City of Devils was pretty cool too. There were lots of Taoist customs for keeping good health and making money, which involved stepping carefully and balancing on one foot at various times. I burned a passport to provide guidance in the afterlife for a departed one. Impressively, there was one muscular local who could move a big stone on top of a point, which proved his discipline to us flabby land lubbers.
A day later, on the excursion, the mountain people sang for us at the little gorge. They used to ride their horses through the pass where the Yangtze now flows. They make a living by singing for the cameras and helping us to dress up in cocoa matted costumes. Actually, the acoustic of the flooding is quite atmospheric and the bridges that the government are building near the opening section show the great rise of the water level. It’s rather mighty and devastating. If you’ve walked along the Grand Union Canal, you could appreciate the engineering and human ingenuity. The journey through the gorges is like witnessing an ecological change in time. It’s remarkable how banal propaganda can be when you are a tourist. The guides were quite non plussed about the impact to the river system and presented us with low level statistics and pointed out the open air coffins which were hanging from the sides of the gorges.
